This article was first
given as the Presidential Address to the North Staffordshire Field Club
and published in that society’s Transactions 1993-4. It is included here
with Thelma Lancaster’s kind permission.

I first became interested in the Audleys as a result of working at the Abbey and
writing its history. To be certain that I had everything right, before I
ventured into authorship, I checked every single reference already known, and
among much else discovered the Collections for a History of Staffordshire.
And in that marvellous array I first met the Audleys.

The only one I had previously known about was Sir James Audley, the Garter
Knight who was
not the Baron of Audley who was with his four squires at the battle of
Poitiers. Initially we thought we had got him at Hilton, but he is far
away in Poitiers in the church of the Carmelites, founded by his friend Sir John
Chandos, and at his funeral the mourners were led by another even more famous
friend, the Black Prince. I went to have a look there one day, but there
is even less left of that church than there is of Hulton. (I asked for
directions at the Poitiers Tourist Office, and they were most helpful, even
ringing the University for information. It must have been quite a change
from railway time-tables!).

The Audleys seem to have been a cadet branch of the De Verdons of Alton, and
Henry de Audley, who had had both Heley Castle and Hulton Abbey built, was the
second son of Adam de Audley who was at one time Custos of Chester during the
minority of one of the Earls, Ranulph de Blunderville (Whitchurch). To be
Custos presupposes a reliable man, and it also meant that Henry, much of an age,
probably know the Earl from boyhood, which makes it less surprising that in
later years he was one of the Earl’s following, and was chosen to be his deputy
as Sheriff of Staffordshire and Salop.

Henry had had an elder brother, also Adam, who is known to have served in
Ireland with the De Laceys. Both were at least in their twenties when, in
1194, Henry witnessed a deed, and it is a fair assumption that Henry also served
in Ireland, for when his brother Adam was killed in 1211, Henry inherited some
lands he held in Dunley as well

as being given his
brother’s Constableship of Cashel. Their father had died in 1204, so Henry
was now Lord of Audley as well, and in the course of settling his brother’s
affairs, we find him confirming a grant originally given by Adam senior, to
Robert le Blund of 200 acres of land in Chell and Burwardeslyme, for which
Robert was to pay one pound of cumin pepper yearly. Pepper was not cheap.
When all the debts to the King’s Treasury and others were settled, Henry went
back to Ireland and served with De Lacey until the latter’s disgrace in 1214,
when Henry transferred to the following of the Earl of Chester.

That Earl Ranulph de Blunderville was one of the few Magnates to stay loyal to
the Crown in spite of all the provocation the current wearer, King John, was
giving them, and when at last John was forced to seal Magna Carta, Chester was
there with his knights and men in support including most probably Audley among
the knights and Staffordshire men among the supporters. (It would be
interesting to know what they made of it). John had still a year to reign
and in those months he did his best to get even with his disloyal barons,
ravaging his unfortunate lands in the process, while the French Army brought in
by the barons ravaged the parts he missed. At last the King tried to cross
the River Welland at the wrong time of the tide, losing all his baggage,
including his crown, in the quicksands and was shortly dead from an unwise diet
and sheer rage.

With King John dead there was a chance to start again. The French were
ousted, and after their defeat at Lincoln they were glad to go. Henry III
- a boy of nine - was crowned King, using one of his mother’s bracelets, and the
Earl of Pembroke was chosen to govern England for him. The Earl of Chester
was one of his strongest supporters and among the appointments he was given was
that of Sheriff of Staffordshire and Salop, and as I have said he made Audley
his Deputy. By then Henry de Audley was getting on for forty. There
is no record that he married more than once, and it was about this time that he
married Bertrade de Meisnilwarin, who gave him a family of at least five sons
and two daughters, Ranulf, James, Adam, Henry, Nicolas, Alice and Emma.

He also built his castle at Heley, exchanging land he held at Le Knole near Rye
Hills, with Henry de Bettley for the purpose, and on the steep hillside above
the road between Betley and Newcastle he erected the sandstone castle, reputedly
from stone hewn from the deep dry ditch that surrounds it. There is too
little left to say with certainty what it looked like, but others of roughly the
same period had a tall central keep with outbuildings in the bailey. There
are records, extant from a century later, for payments for cleaning Heley’s
great hall, whitewashing various buildings, and other repairs. It boasted
a “colehouse”
and in the middle 1300s there was a murder committed in its kitchen. By
the early 1500s it was ruinous, and was more or less demolished by the Stafford
Committee of Parliament in 1644 in case some desperate Royalist should try to
re-fortify it. One or two fragments still show on the hilltop.

Henry de Audley was very proud of his castle and added a park nearby, the park
still heard of in Silverdale. Henry III was sufficiently interested in the
undertaking to give Audley 12 hinds towards the stocking of it. Parks then
were not like parks now. They were fenced enclosures, sometimes large
enough to hunt in, where animals, mostly deer, were kept. It ensured that
food supplies were nearby. Nor was the killing all one way for there are
records of a man being killed by a stag in Heley’s park. At much the same
time Audley founded Hulton Abbey and endowed it with quite a lot of land, some
of which he had inherited from his mother and some of which he had bought.
For the rest of his life he considered himself the patron of the monks and
looked after their secular interests - just as the Earl of Chester was looking
after his Abbey of Dieulacresse at Leek.

By the time Henry had become by inheritance, gift, marriage and purchase one of
the most important men in North Staffordshire, the days of 40 days castle guard
for his manors now gone, commuted for a rent. Unfortunately, like so
many of his kind, he liked a good law suit. One of them concerning Horton
dragged on for 15 years, and even trial by combat didn’t settle it, though
Henry’s man won.

The King trusted him and in 1226 made him Constable of Kermadyn Castle
(Carmarthen), Governor of Cardigan Castle and allowed him to fortify a castle of
his own at Redcastle, near to Hawkstone, on just such a hilltop as Heley.
A little later he made him Governor of Shrewsbury and Bridgnorth Castles
with responsibilities for the repairs to the defences and living quarters as
well as the carriage of food and war materials to the King. He was also
appointed to be Sheriff of Salop and Staffordshire for the first time, and when
the King came of age in 1227 he confirmed to Audley all the lands he had
previously held, including some that had been given him by the Earl of Chester.
There was a gift of further land in Egmundun and Newport for which he paid
yearly to the King one sparrowhawk on the Feast of St. Michael. In 1230
the King gave him the manor of Ford in Salop in fee farm for a rent of £12 per
annum. These were the first lands he held directly of the King.

That same year Audley, approaching fifty, and his brother William, not much
younger, were part of the army which the young King took to France, sailing from
Portchester to St. Malo on ships the size of the Gosport Ferry. Apart from
receiving the homage of the Gascon nobility little seems to have been achieved
despite all the money it cost. Audley’s standing was rising all the time,
and when in 1231 the Earl of Chester granted to his sister Hawise all the county
of Lincoln, Audley witnessed the deed in the kind of company that General
Wrottesley said proved that while he might not yet be a baron by Writ, he was
certainly regarded as one by tenure. He was also Sheriff again and still
Sheriff when the Earl died a year later. Nor was he making any money out
of it, for a year or two later the King is remitting the debts Audley contracted
in his work as Sheriff and, as a mark of his favour, allowing him to bring his
Irish crops into England without paying English Customs. Very recently it
has been brought to my attention that there is an Audley’s castle at the south
end of Strangford Loch near Belfast. The picture showed a castle very like
Rochester’s and there was a quay for shipping nearby.

1237 found him Constable of Chester and Beeston castles, appointed after the
death of the last Earl of Chester, John of Huntingdon. (One wonders if it
was in Audley’s time that the paintings recently discovered in one of the towers
of Chester Castle were made). That summer he went twice to meet the Welsh
Prince Llewellyn, to treat for peace, though whatever he and his fellow treaty
makers achieved, it did not last. Peace on the Welsh border never did
last, even before the time of Edward I. Audley was now at least 64, an
elderly man for those times, and the King appointed him to be Constable of his
castle in Newcastle-under-Lyme, conveniently near to Heley, and with the manor
of Newcastle included as well. He paid a rent of £69 a year for it to the
King and in return was entitled to various dues from the manor and the small
township of Newcastle.

For some three years life was quiet, for when next we hear of him he is off to
Wales again, once more trying to make peace. This time, 1241, the
King was there too, and afterwards the Royal cavalcade came back through
Newcastle, and King Henry, well known for liking his comfort, disliked the
accommodation prepared for him. Audley was given orders for repairs and
alterations, also the cash do do them. At much the same time he was given,
more personally, leave to have a three day fair at Betley, on the Vigil, Feast
and Morrow of St Margaret, which occurs some time in the summer. Fairs
were money spinners!

A strong feeling comes over that he was the valued and trusted supporter of the
King, and in 1244 we find that his son James had been given to wife Ela the
daughter of William de Longspee, who was the son of the Earl of Salisbury, which
Earl was a bastard son of Henry II, the King’s grandfather - a not too distant
relative of the King himself. As a bride gift from her mother, Ela brought
with her the manors of Stretton and Heredwyk in Oxfordshire, but Stretton at
least never seemed to have become part of the Audley patrimony for Ela left it
later to her youngest and favourite son - Hugh.

In the autumn of 1246 both Audley and James were in Worcester where they were
among the witnesses of a Royal Charter. Not much later Henry Audley
died, for James swore fealty for his lands on 19th November 1246. There
was a lot to inherit even after James’s mother had her widow’s share.
Altogether there seem to have been 19 manors in Staffordshire, 8 in Salop and
various others elsewhere. There is some evidence too that the Bishop of
Lichfield was concerned lest some land that James held of him might be given to
Hulton Abbey - a small sign that the non-monastic world was getting worried
about how much of the country was getting into the hands of monks, nearly all of
whose Orders had their headquarters outside the Realm. James had to
promise not to give any more away. Like his father before him he was
Constable of Newcastle’s castle, and he had to get repairs done too. Some
were to the castle pool whose state was “damaging to the King’s fish”.
There was further work to be done when Henry III came through in 1256.
(The pervading smell of new paint on a Royal visit is nothing new!) James
was also in the Courts a great deal, either as a complainant or defendant, as
well as keeping an eye on the business affairs of his mother and his aunt Emma,
a lady who married three times and was always having trouble with her dower
rights.

Sometime in the 1250s James exchanged some land in Apedale and Chesterton
together with a 50 shilling rent in Nantwich, for the manor of Kenardesley, held
by Thomas de Kenardesly. Thomas had not been strong enough to hold his
manor against the Welsh, but James held it peaceably enough for five or six
years, until he was called to be one of the brilliant train that went with
Richard of Cornwall, the King’s younger brother, when he went to Aachen to be
crowned King of the Romans. Audley left Kenardesley in the care of his
uncle Griffith ap Madoc, (Emma’s first husband), but Griffith held it barely a
month before the Welsh drove him out. Even if James knew before he got
back to England there was nothing he could do. As soon as he was back, he
mustered his men, and put the Welsh out in their turn. In a short time he
restored matters, erected or re-erected some small buildings and left deputies
in charge while he returned to England. But he was hardly out of sight
when the Welsh came back and burned the lot! The chronicler, Matthew
Paris, says that on this occasion some of James’s brothers were killed,
and I wonder if here we have the answer to the burial that was found at Hulton
Abbey in the 1930s when the report said that the bones showed signs that the
owner had been burnt alive. By then there was real war on the Marches, and
James was very busy there. The seeds of what is called the Barons’ War
were already sown, aggravated by two bad harvests, and the trouble with the
Welsh gave some of the Barons a good reason for putting themselves on a war
footing and raiding their neighbours’ lands and the countryside generally.
Henry III was well into middle age now and his ways of ruling did not help.
(For a start too much money, needed elsewhere, was being spent on Westminster
Abbey). So, as they had done to his father, the Baronage presented him
with a long list of grievances, this time known as the Provisions of Oxford.
As a result a group of influential men were made into a council to advise the
King. Audley was one of them, and his brother-in-law Peter de Montfort,
who had married Alice de Audley, was another. Matters might have resolved
themselves but for Simon de Montfort (no relation of Peter) and the war started
soon afterwards. Peter sided with the Barons and Simon de Montfort but
James stayed with the Crown and King, one of the few men of standing in
Staffordshire who did so.

Of all kinds of war, civil is the worst for it puts brother against brother.
700 years later on we can’t tell what sort of effect it had on the Audley
family, but some effect there must have been. As soon as the trouble
really began James was sent to replace his brother-in-law as Constable of the
two castles of Shrewsbury and Bridgnorth. (Quite often one finds James
doing the same work his father had done, including being Sheriff of
Staffordshire and Salop). But it was also the kind of war where sometimes
it helped to have kinsmen on the other side. James seems to have had the
chance to get a captured nephew released after the Battle of Northampton, but
another side seems so peculiar to us. By this time James and Ela had a
family of at least five sons and a daughter, and in August 1264 we find him
letting the six year old Nicolas be taken as a hostage by the other side.
The reasons are lost in the mists, but unlike many hostages, Nicolas was lucky:
he passed into the care of his aunt Alice and her husband Peter de Montfort, and
in time came safely home. But there is room to wonder if this was at the
root of James’s sometimes troubled marriage. Ela’s feelings must have been
beyond belief.

I’m not going into the details of the Barons’ War. James spent much of it
on the Welsh Marches, and just before the Battle of Evesham he was sent to
Lancashire to bring reinforcements from there. It is doubtful if he
arrived before the battle. Possibly he was glad, for Peter de Montfort was
killed there as well as Simon de Montfort, and Peter’s two sons had narrow
escapes. Within the month James was in Wales again, this time raising the
siege of Hawarden Castle, and in November he is, yet again, making peace with
the Welsh. It would seem that he had diplomatic gifts like his father had
had. The following year he was appointed Justiciar of Chester, and as such
was very busy. He also kept an eye on his widowed sister’s business
affairs in addition to those of his mother and his aunt. About this time
there is a court case in which it states that James and Ela were living apart.
Even if they had not been, she would not have seen much of her husband.

He had wanted to go to the Holy Land with Prince Edward, but the King would not
let him go. He wanted him to be Justiciar of Ireland. There is a
faint chance that he was able to go on Pilgrimage to Santiago di Compostella
before he crossed to Ireland, and I hope he did for Santiago was his name Saint,
and James would need all his prayers for the work he was sent to do. He
was amongst the fighting almost as soon as he got there, but his biggest
problems were the feeding and equipping of his men. For that he needed
money and a great deal of it. If there was any from the Treasury it was
soon exhausted, and he borrowed wherever he could, with the result that his
personal finances got into the gravest disorder, and before he could put them
right he was killed, said to have fallen from his horse and broken his neck.
He comes down as a man so wedded to his work that it is a little surprising and
slightly amusing to find an item in the Forest of Cannock accounts that ...
James de Audley, his son James, his chaplain, his squire and others unknown had
taken two deer and were to be called to account for it.

He left five sons and possibly another and a daughter, and was succeeded by his
eldest son, James. The others were Henry, William, Nicolas, Hugh, Joan and
possibly Giles. James did homage for his lands on 29th July 1272, but his
inheritance was far from undiluted joy. His father was scarcely in his
grave when his creditors came swarming in. English merchants, Irish
townspeople, an aunt of the King, the wife of Roger Mortimer, Walter de Merton
(Bishop of Rochester whose tomb in Rochester Cathedral I have known all my
life), even the Friar preachers (the Dominicans), and worst of all the King’s
Treasury. For the moment at least the local estates were in the hands of
his uncle Nicolas who is called a clerk. The new King Edward I had
promised some money to the Friar preachers of Newcastle, and Nicolas was told to
give it them out of the money James owed to the King. But for the rest,
the King’s accountants pursued the family remorselessly as one by one four sons
and two grandsons inherited. It seems a little unfair as the money had
been spent on the King’s business.

The sons might fairly be called the unlucky generation. Four out of five
of them succeeded to the Lordship of Heley in ten years, and in each case there
was a relief (death duty) to be paid. Also in two cases, and very nearly
three, a widow’s third had to be found, and at the start of the ten years there
is a chance that Bertrade was still alive. Family money was tight quite
apart from the enormous amounts owed to the Treasury. James had not begun
to deal with the problems when he died, and his brother Henry succeeded.
His chance to deal with it didn’t last long either though when the King (Edward
I) discovered that he was really ill, he gave him an extension of time to
produce his papers and his reasons for non-payment. Ela was still a force
to be reckoned with. Her demands for her dower had come almost before her
husband was buried, and her gift to monks was not to Hulton, but was to Trentham
Priory. It was dated from Heley Castle.

Henry died sometime early in May 1276, his Inquisition Post Mortem (IPM) being
dated 26th May. His heir was his brother William, “aged 21 last St Luke’s
Day (October 18th)”. Yet another relief was due, though from the purely
financial point of view one saving grace was that the eldest brother James’
widow had herself died 8 days previously - and she had been drawing her widow’s
dower from the estates even though she had remarried. Ela had now lost her
husband and two sons in the space of four years.

William was a soldier in the King’s service in Wales when he succeeded and for
the rest of his life he was either in the King’s army or had leave of absence to
straighten out his family’s business affairs. At least twice those affairs
took him to Ireland and Dublin, and nearer home his remaining sister-in-law was
always causing trouble with her dower rights, or what she was doing with her
dower lands which were only hers for her lifetime and which would then return to
the Audleys. She too had remarried. The feeling comes down the
centuries that Lucy did not like William and was trying to squeeze every last
farthing she could from his estates. In addition Florentine money lenders
were attacking his Shropshire and Herefordshire lands for a payment of £85 6s
8d. I wondered about that quite a lot before I found the answer.
Notus and Bergarius of Florence were not just money lenders, they were sellers
of horses, the big war horses needed by fully accoutred knights, and William
would have needed more than one. He was also assailed by Nicolas de
Stafford, when, with Henry de Lacey (Earl of Lincoln), he was sued for suit and
service for free tenements they both held of him in Caldon, Ruston, Hylton and
Burslem. The Audleys were still paying feudal dues for Hulton Abbey 60
years after the foundation.

One New Year, the King agreed to remit £100 of his debts and he was also allowed
to remit £45 which his father had not been able to collect in Newcastle in
1264/65, 15 years before! At much the same time he was given 6 does,
presumably for the herd at Heley. But when everything had been added up,
and after abstracting a sum the Treasury agreed was owed to the Audleys, there
remained a debt of £949 11s 0d to the crown as well as the other debts James de
Audley had owed elsewhere. For those days it was a vast amount of money.

Quite what William intended to do about the debts we don’t know. He may
have considered marrying money as his brother subsequently did, but the events
of Spring 1282 put it all out of his mind. On the Eve of Palm Sunday, in a
violent storm, the Welsh Princes attacked and stormed the Castle of Hawarden,
sacked it and went off with the Justiciar they found there as their prisoner.
From the King downwards the English were outraged. The army was mustered
and moved fast. Everyone was sick and tired of the endless warfare on the
borders. By the end of the summer, a summer full of rapine and slaughter
by the Welsh, the King had got them trapped in the angle opposite the Island of
Anglesey; a pincer movement with Edward himself on the mainland and Luke de Tany
in command in Anglesey. As a result of a TV news item I was given the
information that proves that William was with the King in the summer with a
retinue of 3 knights, 12 troopers and 16 lances (a lance was 3 men), 63 men in
all. In October he drew £29 17s for a week’s wages for 5 constables,
540 archers and 27 captains of “twenties”, and that week ended on 29th October.
By the 6th of November he was certainly in Anglesey.

The reasons for what happened next are still debated, but for my money there are
two possibilities, and neither is treasonable nor unreasonable. A bridge
of boats had been built to cross from Anglesey to Menai, but early November
brings either heavy mists or driving north-westerly gales on that coast.
They might have tried to get across under cover of mist, but I think it is more
likely that De Tany knew there was a gale brewing and he feared for his bridge.
Either way, he and his army of some 300 knights and men-at-arms crossed, and the
Welsh ambushed them. Grimly they fought their way back to the beach only
to find the tide had come in and for armoured men the bridge was now out of
reach. Sixteen knights with 17 squires and over 200 foot soldiers had
crossed the water and none of them got back.

Sir William de Audley was one of them, and modern science has proved almost
beyond doubt that the shattered bones with their sword and axe cuts that we
found at Hulton are indeed his. If he was typical of the rest, then there
was desperate fighting on that sea shore as the waves washed idly to and fro,
and the seagulls cried. I would add that it was not unusual for the Welsh
to cut their foes to pieces after death as well as before, and we never did find
Sir William’s head.

So once again a brother succeeded. Nicolas was serving in Wales at the time and
it is to be hoped that he was not one of those who found his brother and
companions. He got his lands within a very short space of time, on 8th
January 1283.

He is the brother we heard of as taken hostage when only six, but during their
childhood there is more to be found in the records about his younger brother
Hugh who seems to have lived at Windsor, under the lee of the castle, and to
have had something of the King’s interest. Hugh was never Lord of Heley, even
though he became the best known of the brothers. He married well, but died
in prison in 1325, having backed the wrong side in Lancaster’s rebellion of
1322. At least his head stayed on his shoulders, which is more than many
of his friends managed.

Nicolas married as soon as he could, to Katherine Giffard who brought him lands
in Hereford-shire and commotes and a castle in Wales. She bore him three
children, a girl Ela, Thomas, known sometimes as “the boy baron”, and another
Nicolas who would in time succeed his brother. As Nicolas spent most of
his time as Lord of Heley in the King’s army in Wales, or Scotland or Gascony,
he can’t have seen much of his children.

In the early years, his brother Hugh seems to have been with him quite a lot, as
they served in Wales, over much the same ground along the north coast that
William had fought over before them. When Edward I turned his attention to
Scotland, neither Nicolas or anyone else had been that way before. Edward
needed money for his campaigns so he summoned a Parliament to grant it, and it
is most probably to this Parliament that Nicolas was summoned by Writ as a
Baron, to become the first Baron of Heley.

Having got his money, Edward set off. By the end of March he was in sight
of Berwick, and because one of the defendants killed his nephew, Richard of
Cornwall, with a crossbow, which I have a feeling was a prohibited weapon at the
time, Edward sacked the town once he got into it. A week later, the Scots
retaliated with raids through Coquetdale and Redesdale and with barbarities as
bad as anything done in the previous century. IPMs for the northern
counties, both then and for the next hundred years, often speak of lands being
worth nothing, having been wasted by the Scots.

We know that Nicolas was with the army, though only occasionally can we pinpoint
him. He must have been at Berwick while Edward had the defences rebuilt,
and he was certainly at the battle of Dunbar, which the English won. And
unless he had fallen sick, of which there is no mention in the records, he was
with the army when Edward set off to subdue Scotland. Ten days after the
battle Edward had captured Roxburgh. On the 6th of June he was at Holyrood
Abby watching while Edinburgh, on the ridge above him, was reduced. (We
are not told how it was done though I do wonder if the 26 skeletons of young men
found when work was done in the castle in the last decade might have had
something to do with this siege). On the 13th, it was Linlithgow, and on
the 14th Stirling surrendered. Then it was Perth. On July 2nd John
Balliol, King of Scotland, submitted and abdicated at Brechin on the 9th before
being sent to England in custody. On the 15th, the English reached
Aberdeen and at the end of the month the Moray Firth was in sight. After
that Edward turned back and came nearer the eastern coast, through Arbroath,
Dundee, Perth and Edinburgh, getting back to Berwick again on August 26th 1296.

A chronicler wrote, “He had conquered Scotland and searched it through in 21
weeks.” Not quite all Scotland as we know it, but definitely most of
inhabited Scotland as it was then. Audley followed his King and
Staffordshire men followed Audley, but no word has come down to us of what they
thought of what they had seen. Not even when 2000 Scottish landowners came
to Berwick to pay homage.

Next year the King was in Gascony and Nicolas was there too - the only place he
seems to have managed to avoid was Ireland, being permitted to let others act
for him there. The greater magnates muttered and refused to go to Gascony,
saying it was the King’s personal inheritance that he wanted from the French,
and not England’s. Edward allowed this, and cut them down to
size later. He was scarcely back from France when Scotland was again in
revolt, so back there they went. And who knows, perhaps behind him Nicolas
had Arrowsmiths from Betley, Bowmans and Beresfords from Alstonfield, and
Thicknesses, Balterlys and Podmores from the Audley area. All these names
occur in his IPM. For those days, the army was huge - and hungry too - for the
supply ships met headwinds and could not keep up with them. But, in time,
they were back over the border, and in time too came the news that Edward
wanted. Wallace was coming his way, and Edward wanted William Wallace very
badly, for he was the one who had begun the present rebellion when he had
defeated the English at Stirling not long before. They met at Falkirk on
the 22nd July 1298, and Nicolas was among the heavy cavalry that swept across
the field and completed the rout of the Scots.

He did have some life away from the army, even if not much, for there are
records of him being licensed to give away some land in Newhall and Aston to
Combermere Abbey (the mother house of Hulton) and he is also mentioned with his
wife’s dowry which had got into the King’s hands when her father died, was to be
returned to Katherine and “her husband Nicolas de Audley”. After
that the next news of him is his IPM taken on 17th September 1299. He was
41 and his wife would survive him for more than 20 years, and spend much of her
time trying to pay off his debts.

His successor was his son Thomas, a boy of 11, and for the first time in nearly
30 years the inheritance went from father to eldest son. Thomas never
actually had his inheritance, for he was not quite 19 when he died. Edward
I and after him Edward II had men to reward, and the obvious way to do it was to
let them have the guardianship of an under-age heir, and/or the profits from his
lands until he reached his majority, meantime paying a rent to the King.
As a result of Edward’s wars there were a number of under-age heirs. There
had been and would be in the future heirs who had only wreckage to inherit
because all the good had been squeezed out of the estates by unscrupulous men.
In Thomas’s case his Wardship was given to one of the Hugh le Despencers, either
father or son, both of whom came to grisly ends. At 14 his lands were in
the custody of Amadeus of Savoy, but when Thomas died very early in 1308, his
IPM said that they were in the hands of Piers de Gaveston until the heir came of
age. The mould was made and for the next 30 years an Audley heir would
find his lands in the “care” of a King’s favourite. His heir in 1308 was
said to be his brother Nicolas who was 18 on the last Feast of St Martin (11th
November). Gaveston would thus have three years of the fruits of the
inheritance, and if, as was thought possible, Thomas’s wife Eve was with child,
he would have them for considerably longer.

In fact, Eve herself did quite well. She had no child by Thomas, but she
had her widow’s dower, which included the manor of Audley and a third of Endon,
and she was married again not much over a year later to Thomas de Ufford.
After him she married Sir Robert de Benhale, and there is a suspicion that at
one point she was also married to one of the Audley cousins, though proof is
wanting. Suffice it that after a marriage of only a few weeks, Eve drew
her dower rights until 1369, a clear 60 years after the death of her first
husband, the Boy Baron. It doesn’t often get a mention when James the
Baron’s tangled affairs are in question. Thomas’s IPM is another mine of
information about the men and women who lived and worked on his lands in this
area and in Alstonfield. Both he and his father had a house by Aldersgate
in London, for which they paid dues to the Dean and Chapter of St Paul.
This was possibly because as Baron, Nicolas was attending Parliament, although
Thomas was too young to do so.

The second Nicolas would not make old bones either, though he crammed a lot into
the years he had. Like so many of his family he was a soldier, and the
fighting in his time was in Scotland. The biggest problem was the King’s
favourite, Piers Gaveston, who had most of the Audley lands. Edward II,
who had succeeded his father in July 1307, was besotted with him. The
Barons hated him, partly because of his minor birth (his father was a squire
only), but mostly I suspect because he had a witty, and for those who were his
butts, a rather cruel tongue. He called the Barons rude names.
Warwick was “The Black Dog of Arden”, Lincoln, who was distinctly fat, was “Pot
Belly” and so on. Eventually the Barons got Edward to send Gaveston out of
the country. He was back almost on the rebound, and spent Christmas of
1311 with the King, and was still in Edward’s company when Edward went north to
get away from the Barons, calling themselves the Lords Ordainers, who were
keeping Edward very much under their thumbs. The King’s party were at
York, and then Newcastle-on-Tyne, and there his cousin, Thomas, Earl of
Lancaster, nearly caught him, having come across the Pennines with his army.
(The best road at that time was probably Hadrian’s Wall or the vallum behind
it). Lancaster did catch the Queen and the Royal Treasure. Edward
and Gaveston got away to Tynemouth, and then by boat to Scarborough Castle,
where Edward left his favourite, sure that he was safe, while he went to York to
raise an army. Unfortunately for Edward the Barons were already at York,
and very soon after at Scarborough where, after a fortnight’s siege and with
food running out, Gaveston surrendered. He had been promised a legal trial
for coming back into England without leave, and he was being taken to
Wallingford for his trial, when he was abducted from a night halt by the Earls
of Warwick, Lancaster and Hereford. Then after a travesty of a trial (or
no trial at all), he was beheaded on Blacklow Hill, near Warwick, on June 17th
1312. Edward never forgave either the perpetrators or their supporters.

There was a backlash of support for the King throughout the country, from the
other earls who had had their word broken for them, downwards. With the
country behind him, Edward could force a public apology from Warwick and the
rest in return for an amnesty. There is a list of 471 men who obtained
pardons for acts of one sort or another against Gaveston, including killing him.
Nicolas is 245th on the list, too far down I think to have had any hand in the
latter crime. The three Earls head it, and amongst the others are 12
important Staffordshire men. Richard and Peter de Limasi were Nicolas’s
own knights, and the two Trussels with Roger de Swynnerton and Hugh de Meunille
must have been at least acquaintances.

There is no saying that Nicolas was with Lancaster’s army. It is possible
because Gaveston still had most of his lands, and those of the Earl of Lancaster
were close by at Newcastle. Moreover, Nicolas had yet to swear his fealty
in spite of the fact that he was nearly 23. Even more he was hoping to
marry the widowed Countess of Lincoln, who was step-mother to Lancaster’s wife.
The story of that marriage casts one or two lights on the way things could get
satisfactorily completed in spite of the odds. Lincoln’s first wife had
died in 1309, and he was a heavy, portly man when Joan was married to him -
hardly any girl’s dream. But she had a very large widow’s dower, which in
a new husband’s hands could do much to raise his standing. If
Nicolas hesitated - almost penniless as he was - Joan might well have made the
running to prevent herself being married to a second elderly lord. They
had married without the King’s leave, and had not paid him his fee, and it was
not long before all her dower lands were impounded. Her marriage had been
given to Ralph de Monthermer, a very ordinary squire before he married, as her
second husband, one of the King’s sisters. Monthermer wanted 900 marks as
compensation. Nicolas had not got such a sum, but he did have friends and
three of them joined forces with him, and told Monthermer that if the 900 marks
remained unpaid then he might levy it from their goods and chattels. It
did not come to that, and by 26th July 1313 Monthermer was satisfied.
Joan’s dower lands were returned to her very soon afterwards, including Knesale
where on 2nd December 1313 her son James was born. James’s Proof of Age
has survived but nowhere in it is there any mention of his father being in the
house or in the vicinity, which accords with the various Letters of Protection
Nicolas had at that time for service on the Scottish border.

Nicolas got his chance (at last) to pay his homage on March 27th 1314, when the
Chancery Rolls state that the Audley lands had been in the King’s hands for over
15 years since 28th August 1299 when his father died. It is as well that
Nicolas could not know that in December 1316 they would be back in the King’s
clutches, to finish up in the hands of the even more grasping favourite, Roger
de Mortimer.

1314 is remembered chiefly for the Battle of Bannockburn which the English lost
- but whose lessons did much to bring about the victories in France.
Nicolas might have been there, he was certainly in the area, a Fine Roll payment
of 500 marks for his retinue of mounted men is in the records. If he was
there he was one of the luckier ones, unlike the young Earl of Gloucester whose
death left his sisters dividing his enormous estate between them, the root cause
of much trouble in the next decade, with, of course, an Audley closely involved.
But that one was Hugh, and he was never a Lord of Heley.

Nicolas died towards the end of November in 1316. He was barely 27, and
his life had at last begun to settle down. He had a happy marriage, a
strong and healthy heir and a small daughter. Heley was comfortable with
hangings on the walls, with gold and silver cups, with silver spoons at the
table and beautiful furnishings in the chapel. In his park there were at
least 80 beasts. He was taking up the civic duties of his rank, sitting on
Commissions of Oyer and Terminer, and leading the hunt for evil doers. I
think he was buried at Hulton Abbey, for 3 years after his death, again at the
end of November, we find Joan at the Abbey, granting a Deed to a Chell tenant.
Was she there for her husband’s anniversary mass?

So once again a minor inherited, and this time he was only three. It was
going to be a long time before he got control of his lands. This child is
the one I call James the Baron, to distinguish him from his kinsman, James the
Garter Knight, who was the grandson of the younger brother of Baron James’s own
grandfather. James the Baron was head of his House, and a man whose life
spanned almost the entire fourteenth century, who survived the battle of Crecy
and the siege of Calais as well as three visitations of pestilence, who learned
early in life that Might is all too often Right, who came into conflict both
with his King as well as with that King’s enemies and with his heir Nicolas more
often than either. Even so when he came to the end of his own life,
Nicolas said in his will that he was to be buried at the end of his father’s
tomb in their Abbey of Hulton. In due time we found both of them, though
their marble tombs have gone.

James was born at Knesale in Nottinghamshire - about 10 miles north-west of
Newark-on-Trent, and at his baptism was lifted from the font by his father’s
cousin James de Audley (eldest son of Hugh) who was his godfather. (In the
fourteenth century there are quite a lot of James de Audley, not all closely
connected with Heley, and they take a little sorting out at times. The
godfather was later to father the Garter Knight.

James the Baron was three when his father died, and this time Joan did not
remarry. I haven’t found it yet, but I expect she paid a fee to be allowed
to stay a widow. She had her dower from Audley, as well as her dower lands
from Lincoln, so the fact that Nicolas was hardly in his grave when his lands
were assigned to Ranolph de Camoys would not leave her penniless. At the
same time James’s marriage was given to Roger de Mortimer. The best place
for a three year old is with his mother, and one hopes it was so with James.
At the same time if Joan was at Heley, then James was all too well placed to see
his mother’s household knights riding out on their lawless ways adding to the
mayhem and general trouble in the area at that time. Two families were
having a local war, and far too many people joined in gleefully. Even
Joan’s clerk, Thomas of Warwick, got involved and seems to have got rather more
than he bargained for. But these were local fights even if very disturbing
for the non-combatants. It was a very different matter and much more
serious for the Audleys and their men when the Earl of Lancaster rebelled in
1321.

This was not a local flurry, for Lancaster was first cousin to the King and was
aiming at his Crown. For the reasons that were still probably as good as
when they sided with the Earl at the time of the Gaveston affair - Heley sided
with him again - and chose the wrong side. For once Edward II behaved as
Edward I would have expected, and it did not take him long to get matters under
control again. By then, Lancaster had been executed (first cousin or no),
Hereford was dead, killed at Boroughbridge, and a good dozen of the other chief
supporters had been hanged - or worse. The Audleys paid for their
rebellion with everyone else. Joan and her sister-in-law Ela were heavily
fined, the elder Hugh de Audley (great-uncle of James) was in prison till he
died in 1325; the younger Hugh, his son, was a hunted fugitive, and, worst of
all, John Giffard, brother of Katherine de Audley hung on a gallows for months.
If Nicolas had still been alive he could well have been beside him. Beside
all that, the fact that Joan’s household knights had also been fined or
imprisoned, and 7 cartloads of treasure had gone missing were minor details.
In the case of the treasure, it was there quite visibly on the Eve of Epiphany
(January 5th 1322) at the gates of Tutbury Priory, but it never arrived at the
castle, and no-one has seen it since - and according to the records Edward II
looked very hard for it. But there are accounts of Robert de Holand
pillaging goods and chattels of Lancaster’s supporters, Joan among them, in that
area, while further north Roger Corbet had removed the 80 beasts from Heley
Park. Peter de Limasi and other members of Joan’s household were captured
at Burton Bridge, and I rather doubt if Peter was freed in spite of paying a
fine and losing his lands, for he died in York very early in 1325 of a natural
illness. One finds that statement sometimes in the plea rolls, and it
usually means that gaol fever got them before the hangman did. (If Joan
had taken her children with her when she retired to Tutbury, then James was even
closer to warfare than he was when he had been at Heley. He was then
eight).

Roger de Mortimer was another who was in prison, and by the time Ela de Perers
died in 1325, James’s wardship had been given to Ranolph de Camoys. Joan
was already dead, so presumably the children were with Camoys. But all
that changed when Mortimer escaped, got to France and when the Queen went to
visit her brother the French King - being totally tired of her husband who had
got another favourite - enamoured her to the point where he became her lover,
and returned to England with her. There was more fighting, and at the end
of it the favourites (the Despencers) were dead, and Edward was a prisoner, soon
to die himself. Mortimer was showered with honours, lands and above all
with power. James de Audley was not the only one who became his ward.

With Edward murdered, Mortimer was the virtual ruler of England. As well
as sons he had seven daughters and he married them off to men who could be very
useful to him - as he thought. One boy was only seven. James at
fourteen and a half was mature in comparison. He was married at Hereford
at the end of May 1328 to Joan Mortimer, in a double ceremony, with Beatrice
Mortimer marrying Edward de Brotherton, a grandson of Edward I, as the other
couple. Queen Isabella and her son Edward III were present, and I cannot
imagine that the Bishop of Hereford, also a connection of Mortimer, allowed such
a splendid affair to take place anywhere but in his Cathedral with himself
performing the ceremony. Later there was a tournament. One way and
another it must have been a day that Hereford in general remembered for a very
long time. Mortimer did not live to see something which happened 18 years
later, when 6 of the brothers-in-law and a nephew were all at the battle of
Crecy, which may be a record for one engagement.

Not long after the wedding James undertook to pay Mortimer the enormous sum of
10,000 marks to be rid of his guardianship. We don’t know what caused
this, whether it was the marriage, or what Mortimer was doing to his estates, or
just Mortimer himself, but even though James had been heir to aunts as well as
his parents, that payment must have had its effects on James’s finances for a
long time.

Edward III bided his time. He knew all about Mortimer being the
Queen’s lover. He knew that Mortimer was ruining the country, and nearer
home he had made the King look a complete fool with his bad advice during
fighting on the Scottish border. When the chance finally came - for
Mortimer was very well guarded - he took it, and on 19th October 1330 a band of
his followers got into Nottingham castle by a secret passage up through the
rock, and then in spite of the Queen’s pleas to “spare gentle Mortimer”, took
that arrogant man prisoner. A month later Mortimer died the same death he
had meted out to the younger Despencer. As it happened, during that month
Edward was 18, and there was no longer a need for a Regency of any sort. A
year later Edward allowed Mortimer’s widow to have the hacked remnants of her
husband’s body for burial. But Mortimer’s tomb has vanished, as has
Wigmore Abbey, while Despencer’s equally hacked body still lies in its tomb by
the High Altar of Tewkesbury Abbey.

On that day in November 1330 when Mortimer died, James the Baron was not quite
17, and he had already seen service in the Scottish wars. His eldest son
Nicolas was almost certainly born and probably the next one, named Roger.
Nicolas was betrothed before he was out of his cradle and married even younger
than James. Where there is room to wonder about the relationship between
James and Joan, Elizabeth seems to have loved her husband right to the day in
1400 when her will said that she was to be buried “with my honourable husband
Lord D’Audley”. She was also prepared to fight tiger fashion for their rights
whenever she felt James was over-riding them. But that was later. At
the time of the marriage she was Lady Elizabeth Beaumont, daughter of Lord John
Beaumont and his wife Alice, Countess of Buchan, and almost certainly felt she
had been married off beneath her station. Two sisters married a Count and
an Earl, and another was the wife (probably the second) of Henry, Duke of
Lancaster. Elizabeth was married to the heir of only a Baron, and one at
that who seemed immortal!

Two sisters, Joan and Margaret, joined Nicolas and Roger in the early 1330s.
James was still serving in Scotland and continued to do so until some sort of
peace was patched up. According to the seventeenth century Staffordshire
historian and antiquary, Chetwynd, Edward III considered James had served him so
well that he cancelled the debt to Mortimer, which had been transferred to the
Crown on Mortimer’s attainder. This is borne out by a document in the
Close Rolls dated 27th November 1334. Edward waived it because Mortimer
had levied it when James was still a minor. In view of various things that
happened later, it has to be remembered that James was barely a year younger
than the King, and with Mortimer as guardian must have come into contact with
Edward on a purely social level quite often as a boy. He was of the King’s
generation while James the Garter Knight was 10 years younger, and although 8
years older than the Black Prince, was more of the Prince’s generation.

When James’s wife Joan died is not clear, but by 1342 James seems to have had a
son James by his second marriage to Isabella, believed to be the daughter of
Lestraunge of Knokyn. This time the marriage seems to have been really
happy though, as sometimes happens, the children of the first marriage were not
as happy about it as was their father. He had been in Scotland as Governor
of Berwick and Justiciar of Edward’s lands in Scotland at the time of Sluys in
1340, (Edward’s first win in the Hundred Years’ War), then in 1343 he went
overseas on the King’s affairs with his cousin the younger Hugh, long restored
to favour and now Earl of Gloucester. When the war flared up again and the
new Earl of Lancaster took an army to Gascony, James and his men were part of
that force. This Earl, Henry, was the nephew of the Thomas who rebelled in
1322 and was a totally different sort of man, who in his own time was renowned
for his courtesy and diplomatic abilities as well as his fine fighting and
campaigning skills. Later, as I have said, he married Elizabeth de
Audley’s sister. Documents survive that give the names of many of James’s
men. Some were his tenants, but not all, for now the King paid his leaders
to recruit the best men for the job, no longer sending out summons for all men
between 16 and 60. These days men were clothed and armed uniformly - and
were well trained. It was the day of the long bow, and the finest bowmen
in Europe were the English and the Welsh. The Damparts and the Rouleghs
were probably James’s own men, but Ovyoteshay is from further south in the
county. They were among the mounted archers. Tromwyn, Cheswortham,
Grendon, Cruwe, Griffin, Vernon, Massi, Hodnet, Woore, Swynnerton, Meveral, even
Kerdyf, are among the men at arms, the heavy cavalry. They left Heley on
26th April 1345, joined the Earl on the 18th May, and were then paid by him.
The one knight, Sir John Tromwyn, had 2s a day, the 40 esquires 1s a day and the
mounted archers 3d. Nicolas was there too with Lancaster, either as a page
or a young squire.

It was a very successful, but hardly remembered campaign, and when winter came
Lancaster stayed in Gascony with many of his men. James came home, and
went out again with the King the following year on what became eventually the
Crecy campaign. James, later to be the Garter Knight, went too. This
new campaign was necessary because, during the winter, the French had counter
attacked in Gascony and retaken some of the towns captured by the English the
year before. Edward knew that this time he needed to cut the French lines
of communication and destroy as many of their supplies as he could. so
while people thought he was going to Gascony, instead he sailed to Normandy, to
land at La Hogue, not so very many miles from the Sword and Juno beaches
of the last war. he took with him the best equipped army to leave England
till the BEF in 1914, and it included a large “engineering” section, as well as
fighting men and their retinues. (I ought to point out that the war began
partly for trade reasons and partly because Edward considered he had a better
claim to the crown of France than the man who was wearing it. This
accorded to English law if not French!)

Normandy was not expecting the invaders and they landed almost unopposed, and
for 24 hours unloaded baggage and horses. Then they formed into three
divisions, and set off down the Cherbourg Peninsula, burning and looting in
classic chevauchee
style. There were two Marshals, the Earl of Warwick and de Harcourt (a
Frenchman at outs with his own King), and the Constable of the Army was the Earl
of Arundel. James the Baron was always with Arundel, James KG always with
the Black Prince.

Until they reached Caen, the ships sailed parallel with the army with enough men
at arms and archers still on board to give strong support if needed. After
the taking of Caen, the booty was so great that Edward sent his navy home with
it and the prisoners and marched away from the sea. There would come a
time when he would need that support and it would not be there. The trail
of destruction continued, but by then the French had recovered from their
surprise, and were breaking down the bridges to trap the English, and they had
to move as far along the Seine as Poissy before they found one that could be
repaired, letting not only the men across but also the precious baggage wagons,
which carried all the spare equipment as well as more loot.

King Philip of France was on their heels now, and what had been a leisurely
plundering expedition turned into a chase with the impassable Somme in their
way. For three days they marched along its banks, getting closer and
closer to the sea, with food running short, the sun making ovens of their armour
and the thick dust rising in clouds as they made their passage. worse
still for the mounted men, many of the horses had died and they were forced to
trudge along carrying all the weight of their equipment. They were trapped
and from the King down they knew it. Edward asked his officers to find out
if any of the prisoners knew of a way across the river, and if he did and would
tell of it then the King would free him and his companions and give him money
too. A man called Gobin Agace came and informed the King of the ford at
Blanchetacque where there was a way across on the chalk at low tide.

Either one of the Audleys might have heard him tell his news, both were
certainly in their places next morning when the army marched down to the ford in
the early mists, and then the men waited by the ford with their eyes over their
shoulders in case the French came before low water. By mid-day they could
start across, and Hugh le Despencer - whose father had come to a traitor’s end
in the previous reign - splashed down into the water to lead the bowmen as they
fought their way across under covering fire from their friends still on
the bank. The opposition on the far bank fled or died and the army poured
across, only just in time, the water rising round the wheels of the last wagons
and the rear-guard fighting off the van of the French before they too could take
it to the water. One or two didn’t make it and were taken prisoner.
Some French tried to follow till deterred by English arrows, but the main French
army had to watch impotently as the English marched away from them. The
English had needed a miracle and had been given one, the kind our generation got
at Dunkirk.

It had been a magnificent feat, but it only delayed the inevitable. From
then on Edward was looking for a good defensive position and when he found it at
Crecy, he was on land that was part of his mother’s dowry. He set out his
out-numbered divisions, two in front and the third behind as a reserve. He
took command of that one himself and watched the battle from a windmill that
commanded a view over the whole battlefield. The Prince of Wales was in
nominal command of the first division, where James KG was also. The Baron
was in the second division with Arundel, guarding the Prince’s wing.

Froissart tells of the long nerve-stretching delay as they waited for the French
to move forward, of the flight of crows (birds of ill omen) that flew over both
armies, and the torrential rain that drenched them all before the battle ended,
leaving the sun well down in the western sky, shining straight into the eyes of
the French.

The English bowmen became a legend in their own lifetimes that day, the armoured
knights and squires, also fighting on foot, had much to do as well, for sheer
weight of numbers meant that there were times when the French did reach the
English lines. In particular, the Prince’s division suffered, but when
help was sought from the King he only said, “Let the boy win his spurs”.
Froissart, anxious for the reputation of the Black Prince, would have us believe
that his was the only division engaged, but it was not so. Arundel’s men
were also fighting, and one of them, Robert de Brente, a tenant of the Baron’s
was killed near to him. (The following year his executors were excused all
further demands for the war on James’s testimony.) Darkness came before
the fighting ended, and men dropped where they stood and slept. In the
morning, the black-robed clerics went down the valley with the heralds to try
and find out who was dead in the shambles, and came back with a list that was
almost past believing. The blind King of Bohemia, whose three-feathered
crest the Black Prince adopted, was at the top, and the unfortunate levies
ridden down by the impatient knights were at the bottom, in all over 30,000 men.
In comparison, the English had got off lightly, but there were still funerals to
hold before the King could move on.

He reached Calais three days later, and having looked it over, the walls manned
and the gates closed, knew he could not take it by assault. So he settled
down to starve it out and save his own men. He had a little town of timber
houses with roofs of reeds and broom built between Calais and the river -
markets were held there. A year is a long time to life under those
sort of conditions, and it cannot have been long before the marshy nature of the
nearby ground began to affect them all and dysentery made its appearance as well
as more ordinary illnesses. Many of Edward’s men died, including the Earl
of Surrey. General Wrottesley, who served in the Crimean campaign last
century, said that conditions at Calais were vastly worse than they had been in
the Crimea, “But Edward had not had newspaper correspondents to tell the world
what they were like”. One occasion I would have liked to have seen
occurred in October, a few weeks after the siege began. Edward was
granting pardons for all the offences men had committed up to a few days before,
though they had to remain with the army for the pardons to remain effective.
There were at least 800 to be pardoned that day. The queue must have wound
right round the camp. Both Audleys were in it, quite clearly separate
persons, so were all the Earls, as well as lesser men, one of whom was Richard,
son of John in the Wro of Newcastle-under-Lyme. Presumably the messuage
and land was where Roe Lane is now.

The horses suffered as well as the men, and in May 1347 James was, with some 30
other commanders, on this side of the Channel looking for remounts. Then
came the news that King Philip was at last moving to the aid of his subjects,
and the commanders were bidden to hasten back and leave the horses till another
time. Philip came no nearer than Sangatte before he realized that he could
not break through the English lines, and under the gaze of eyes straining from
the walls of Calais, retreated again. Calais held out until August, and
then surrendered, and like the four squires of Poitiers, the six burghers of
Calais are famous. When Queen Philippa knelt before her husband and begged
for their lives, the two Audleys must have been among the crowding soldiers who
saw it happen.

After that their ways parted. James KG stayed with the Prince and served
him as a soldier and administrator till he died of fever in 1369 at the age of
47. The Baron, on the other hand, seems to have returned to England to
meet a long series of court cases. Some he won and some he lost, as when
he insisted that the presentation to the church at Chetelton belonged to him as
guardian of the under-age heir. Unfortunately for him, the Abbey of
Dieulacresse, founded by the Earls of Chester was also interested. They
invoked the Prince of Wales, who was also Earl of Chester, and considered
himself the heir of the old Earls and so patron of the Abbey. Two or three
haughty letters went to James from the 17 year old Prince, and Chetelton stayed
with the Abbey.

1348 and 1349 saw Europe, then England and afterwards Scotland and Ireland,
ravaged by the Great Pestilence, called the Black Death, and though James and
his family escaped, his tenants in Devon were badly hit and so was Hulton, his
Abbey. To help them he gave them the profits from two churches. We
think that is the reason why he had the communication from the Pope that had the
Bulla Seal attached.

March 1350 found him summoned, with a dozen of his rank, to advise the King on
the safety of the country. He held a lot of land in south-west Wales,
inherited from his mother’s family, the Martyns, he being the last heir of
sisters and a brother who died childless. The land included Newport, near
to Cardigan. The Martyn family had founded the Abbey of St Dogmaels, and
it was the discovery of that fact that was the key to much else for me.

In 1351 a James de Audley was leading the relief force to St Jean D’Angelys in
company with Sir John Chandos, Sir Bartholomew Burghersh and Sir Ralph Ferrars.
The other names suggest that it was more likely to have been James KG, but if it
was James the Baron then it was his swan song. In 1353 he was officially
exempted from foreign service, so long as he still provided fighting men in the
numbers his estates warranted, and led them himself if England herself was
threatened. At the same time Edward gave him one of those all-encompassing
pardons. It is almost certain that we found the remains of James at the
Abbey, and when Miss Sue Brown examined them, she said that many of the bones in
wrists, hands, knees and elbows had all the padding on the ends of them worn
away. He also had three bones in his neck fused, and osteo-arthritis in
his spine. I possess a copy of the medical report. To be given
exemption at the age of 39, when most of the rest were fighting for at least
another decade, argues that his state must have been very visible. It
might also account for the fact that in later years he seems to have had a
hair-trigger temper!

Domestic troubles flared up in the summer of 1352. Later events showed
that it had been simmering for some time. Nicolas and his full blood
brother Roger, both grandsons of that far from law-abiding man Roger de
Mortimer, led a band of men into the parks and castles of Redcastle and Heley,
drove off 500 sheep worth £100 and did some looting in the buildings. A
lot of what was taken seems to have been armour, bascinets, aventals and so on.
The herd in the parks suffered as well. Some of the men had ridden with
James to Gascony and Crecy, others might have been his tenants, but no real
reason for the trouble is given. (Nicolas was also causing trouble in
Cheshire.) It has to be remembered that the Black Death had badly thinned
the number of people still left to till the land, and James would sit on the
Commission of the Statute of Labourers a few years later. Possibly he
wasn’t keen on having to pay more for labour in his fields. Certainly he
was chronically short of money, had been so for a long time and would be for a
long time to come.

We get an interesting list of some of his possessions when he was accidentally
caught up in someone else’s troubles. In 1352 he had left quite a lot of
property at the house of Robert de Gyen at Bristol, and Robert was in trouble
with the King to the extent that all his goods and chattels were taken into the
King’s hands. I found his IPM. He died at Fulham in January 1353,
his next heir being his nephew who was a clerk and who was currently in the
prison of the Bishop of Wells. James petitioned for the return of his
property, and mentioned “in the nursery at the side of the hall” money, a great
bugle horn, a gilt chalice and paten, a book of romance, a charter of pardon for
felonies, riots, terrorisings and other small things, together with 2 long
towels, all in a long chest. There was linen in a coffer in the lowest
chamber of the tower, and on a cord in the same tower were hanging trappings for
war horses, embroidered with the arms of Audley. There was also bed linen.
Another coffer held silver table ware, 56 different pieces, together with 24
silver spoons and “one cross with the staff of 5 pieces of silver”. There
were rings, brooches and other jewels in a little coffer within it. Lady
Audley also had jewels and money there. Separate cases held 2 of her hoods
and a “noted breviary, 3 books of romance and 2 pairs of linen robes”. I’m
not surprised that James wanted it all back, particularly the pardon. In
view of the fact that his youngest sons were called Roland and Oliver, I would
put a small bet on one of the books of romance owned by Lady Audley being the
“Song of Roland.

James was also having trouble on his Devon estates, where a fair on his manor of
Holdsworth was disrupted by riots caused by armed men, who had injured his men
and ruined his profits. Worse, Richard Durecombe, who seems to have been
his bailiff, went off with £40 of James’s money, and when he was arrested was
released by friends and again James’s men were hurt. It took 3 years to
get Durecombe before the courts.

The full background reasons for James’s actions in 1353 are not clear, but do
leave one wondering if he was trying to protect the interests of his second
family against Nicolas and Roger, and, of course, Elizabeth, who had yet to give
him a grandson (and never would). Some of his manors in Somerset and Devon
he pledged to the King, and others were remaindered to the King after the deaths
of James’s sons. He now had 6 sons from his two marriages as well as 4
daughters. They were Nicolas and Roger, James, Thomas, Roland and Oliver;
Joan and Margaret, a second Margaret and Catherine. I have been told that
some of the Audley men had red hair, and I think that both James and Nicolas
must have had it. Neither was very tall. James (and we could measure
him) was about 5 feet 8 inches, and Nicolas was left his body armour in his
will, and it would not have been much use if their were not of a size.

Then James was in more trouble, this time for trespass and extortion in
Gloucestershire and Somerset. The King showed clemency. James had
been fined £2000, but Edward said that James had given his Oath to the King and
Council that he would mend his ways, and for that, and “for other causes moving
him” he was halving the fine to £1000 and his son Nicolas was to help him pay
it. The “causes” might refer to the illness afflicting James - probably
acquired fighting Edward’s battles - or, indeed, that he had known him a long
time. The Earl of Stafford was one of the sureties for them. He was
the most important man in Staffordshire and also married to an Audley, Margaret,
the daughter of the younger Hugh. In addition he was a long-time
colleague. By this time it was 1354, and on the 2nd of December Edward
gave James and Nicolas another of those all-encompassing pardons.

The Battle of Poitiers was fought on 19th September 1356, and a nephew and a
son-in-law were there, as well as James KG; but neither of his sons of military
age fought there. Nicolas was in dire trouble in England. He and
some of his followers had rescued some impounded cattle and a servant of the
Sheriff of Herefordshire had been killed. All the offenders were pardoned,
but what it cost them is not stated.

James sat on the Commission of the Statute of Labourers for 2 years, and at
about this time he was giving daughters in marriage. Catherine, a daughter
of the second marriage, married Thomas Spirgenel, the King’s Yeoman, and was
given a manor in Wiltshire and 25 marks of rent by her father. The elder
Margaret had married Roger, the son of Lord Roger Hillary, the Chief Justice.
Joan, the eldest daughter, had married John Tuched, and a little later the
second Margaret married Fulke Fitzwarin, whose wardship James had bought some
time previously. At this time even Nicolas was sufficiently in accord with
his father to be given the manor of Edgemond in Salop.

When the temporary peace between England and France collapsed again in 1359, the
King went back to France with his army. James stayed at home, though both
Nicolas and Roger went. Roger was with the Prince of Wales, Nicolas with
his cousin, the Earl of March (the Mortimer attainder had been lifted years
before). It was late in the season for campaigning, and conditions went
from bad to very bad indeed. Edward wintered in Burgundy, but supplies,
particularly forage for the horses, gave out, and spring being very late, Edward
was forced to move south. On the heathland just to the north of Chartres
(which hasn’t changed much in the centuries since), his steel-clad army was
caught by one of the worst storms in history, and cold, hail and lightning
killed hundreds of horses and many man. Edward viewed it as a sign from
Heaven, and said he would accept any peace compatible with his honour. At
Bretigny on May 8th 1360 he sealed such a peace with the Dauphin. The King
of France had been a prisoner in England since Poitiers, and the Dauphin was a
much cleverer opponent for Edward. Roger de Audley was one of the many
casualties of this campaign.

The sons of James’s second marriage were growing up now, and in 1361 he made
provision for them, settling various manors in Devon on them. Totnes and
“Ilfridicombe” are two that were mentioned. He also had a grandson, even
if not an Audley one, for Margaret Fitzwarin bore a son on the 2nd March 1360.
When Margaret was up and about again, there was a feast at James’s house at
Combe Martyn of sufficient magnitude to be remembered 21 years later. At
much the same time, the Prince of Wales gave James and his wife licence to hunt
on Dartmoor. I think that James was probably spending more time in the
south than at Heley, though that castle was still being kept in good order.
Remembering the endless quarrels between them, and I am far from having listed
them all, it is surprising to find as late as 1362/3 a payment in the
accounts of Heley castle for the repair of the rooms of the Lord Nicolas.
Yet within the year James was trying to break the entail for Newport in Camoys
(the one near to Cardigan). He failed. Another item in those
accounts concerns “Richard the Krypel”, who was being paid a wage of 3d a week.
I wonder if this was Richard, son of John in the Wro, who was at Calais.
I’ve also wondered if his was the skeleton found at Hulton with dislocated hips.

Then James was in real trouble and perhaps this case discloses the background to
much that had gone before. I have always had the feeling that there was no
love lost between Nicolas’s wife and her father-in-law, James the Baron, and I
think she nudged Nicolas into many of his confrontations with his father.
This time she took the Baron to Parliament for breaking an indenture he had made
with her mother at the time of her marriage to Nicolas (it was probably a dowry
payment). At that time James was 17, and either still in wardship to
Mortimer, or just facing the fact that it had cost him 10,000 marks to be rid of
him. It was sorted eventually, but James had to pay heavy damages and find
sureties for £6000 until the damages were paid.

In 1367 he was on a Commission of Array, choosing men for the army - and
probably enjoying himself in a familiar atmosphere. Bad times came back in
the early 1370s, for he lost a number of his family. James and Oliver died
and so did his daughter Catherine Spirgenal together with two sons-in-law.
John Touchet was killed in a battle with the Spaniards off La Rochelle in 1371,
and Fulke Fitzwarin died too. By 1374, the Baroness, his wife, was gone as
well. We think we found her remains, beside her husband, a small lady with
delicate bones.

James lived on, his relationship with Nicolas as bad as ever. Two or three
times in the 70s they were both summoned to make provision for defence in case
the French attacked Wales - these were the only times they did anything in
concert. Nicolas’s behaviour was getting more and more lawless and some
time about them he was threatened with being declared an outlaw and he was only
saved because he was needed at Newport Castle in case the French invaded.

James got another summons to was in 1377, and about then he lost another son,
Roland. He had been attending Parliament for many years and was still
attending the year before he died. He even had a summons to war in 1385,
being then 72. I presume some clerk got out the wrong file!

He must have been in Devon in 1383 because he and his son Thomas were in dispute
with the Abbot of Buckfast about weirs in the river. It did not get to
court because friends intervened and settled it. For once James seems to
have come off best, for the Abbot was to include prayers for Audleys past and
present in several services and was also to put up and keep in repair “two
figures of their shields of Arms in the glass of the eastern gable in the
church, and two others in the glass of the gable of the Lady Chapel”. It
was the Abbot who had to pay a fine into the Treasure. Thomas died before
his father and is buried in Audley Church.

That left James with just one son, the childless Nicolas, for whatever she was,
or thought she was, Elizabeth never provided an heir for the Barony.
Perhaps towards the end there was a reconciliation between father and son, for
when James died in the spring of 1386, Nicolas was remembered in his Will, to
have £100, a dozen of silver vessels, and all his body armour. James’s
grandson, another Fulke Fitzwarin and Fulke’s uncle Philip were to have the rest
of James’s armour, plate and mail. His daughter Margaret and the monks of
Hulton were also remembered. Also an otherwise unknown Jenkin de Audley.

They buried the Baron in front of the High Altar of his Abbey, with 5 great
tapers of wax about his coffin, and many other candles. Twenty pounds was
to be distributed to the poor, who were asked to pray for his soul. I have
to say that I have a very soft spot for James, that pugnacious, round-headed and
probably red-haired man, whom I feel was in many ways as much sinned against as
sinning.

Nicolas had 5 years as Baron before he was brought to lie as he had asked “in a
marble tomb like my father’s at the end of his tomb”. Being Baron had not
noticeably calmed him down. Less than a decade later Elizabeth joined her
“honourable husband”.

The succession passed to the Touchets. There were no more Audleys of Heley
Castle and Hulton Abbey.